petermcd

Thank you for introducing me to Terry Davis. I'm going to read more about him.

I am definitely not talking about art.

When I refer to 100x engineer, I'm referring to the impact that QEMU and FFmpeg have had on the world. I would be surprised if anyone who is familiar with these two projects would disagree that they have been highly impactful.

Staff SWE at a FAANG here.

Fabrice Bellard is not a 10x engineer, he is a 100x engineer. You could attach him to a good people manager and either build a team around him or allow him to work independently on a project that he finds exciting that also aligns with company goals.

I'm down in Waikiki, Oahu. If someone wants to do a meetup on a weekend, I'll try to make it.

These articles would be of interest to anyone developing flight avionics systems for spacecraft, airplanes, or, I can imagine, drones.

Some great approaches here!

I like the medium-like bar on the left to browse blocks. Checking the boxes next to the blocks you want to show is a neat way to make a view of just the functions you want to look at. Putting it in a browser, like iPython/Jupyter improves accessibility for people whose main job is not developing software (the Eve demo makes a good example of being able to pass an analytics view to a teammate in marketing).

I do find myself wondering how a literate programming system like this would scale for a large project (I expect the Eve team have thought about this more than I can imagine).

Great polish on the demo, too :)

I've been to India's Satish Dhawan Space Centre for work. They do a lot with the resources they have been given.

The on-base museum exhibits show how their weather and communications satellites help India with its national development goals (agriculture, connecting the countryside, etc.).

Space is hard. India has very reliable rocket (PSLV) that gets satellites to orbit. They have also successfully sent a probe to Mars, which is a real accomplishment for any space program. I was living in China at the time, and the Chinese felt a bit shown up by what they consider to be a less developed economy.

A few points to ponder:

- Money spent counts toward GDP, even if the money comes from a bank loan that will never be repaid (Example: big real estate project in a third-tier city that will never sell for its listed price)

- China's foreign reserves can not be used to pay back debt denominated in Chinese Yuan (foreign currency reserves are the result of people/institutions giving the Chinese government foreign currency in exchange for Chinese Yuan -- you can't do the conversion twice)

- China has a shrinking workforce due to demographic shifts. Specifically, they have moved from an agrarian birthrate to an industrialized one.

You are correct that China has a huge population and workforce. Their wages are rising (which is good for China!) which makes them less competitive as the factory to the world. The Chinese are making progress at moving up the value ladder to help justify those higher wages, but they aren't quite at the top yet. And the workers are very much getting squeezed between high living costs and soon-to-be higher costs to service all that debt and pay benefits to those not in the workforce. These are some reasons why experts are suggesting that China needs a new and more sustainable growth model.

The Chinese government will not allow the Chinese banks to fail the same way the USG did for Bear Stearns. They will likely buy the bad loans from the banks at face value and put them in government-owned asset management companies who will attempt to restructure them.

The cynic in me expects it will probably go worse than Japan since the '90s.

When I lived in Beijing several years ago, I interviewed a guy for a software development position. He worked for a network equipment provider (not Huawei). When I asked him about his work, he told me that his company based their router software on the same leaked version of Cisco's router OS that Huawei had used several years prior (IIRC, there was a court case over this, and Huaiwei switched to their own software).

Based on my experience, the Chinese now have the breadth, depth, confidence, and money to develop complex software on their own, so I expect to see less of this in the future.

As per this article, the Chinese can make a fair point to the US government that so long as Huawei is barred from the US, then there's nothing to discuss about telecom infrastructure equipment.

But I hope and wish the US and other Western governments will press for more media openness in China with the goal of ultimately getting China to tear down their system of censorship and the Great Firewall. Because, ultimately, I believe it hurts modern China more than it helps.

You could do this quickly if you just ran Android with a desktop skin.

I met a local Chinese guy in Beijing several years ago who knew the Red Flag people. Based on what he told me, it sounded like Red Flag positioned themselves as the official Linux of China, which meant they would be specified and required by Chinese government agencies and state-owned enterprises. Red Flag then told the Chinese government that to make Red Flag Linux successful, they would need government funding. With a nascent team, simple product, and this funding in hand, they they went to the big players in the PC and server ecosystems (Intel, etc.) and said that if those companies wanted their hardware sold in China, it would need Red Flag Linux, and Red Flag could provide consulting services to make sure Red Flag Linux ran well on their hardware.

According to the guy I talked to, the Red Flag management team then embezzled most all of the money from the government and US, Japanese, and European companies and left an understaffed team of developers to deliver on the contracts with the foreign companies.

Another Chinese friend said years ago that many Chinese tech entrepreneurs were "just making money off the investors." It didn't make sense to me until I heard the Red Flag story.

No problem. We're all friends here ;)

Fair question.

My impression here in Beijing is that people are highly dissatisfied with the pollution situation. They don't want lung cancer and they don't want their kids breathing this crap.

That being said, the government is taking steps to address the issue. Specifically, due to an outcry on Weibo last year about having to get PM2.5 numbers from the US embassy's twitter feed and iPhone app (twitter is blocked, but screenshots of the iPhone app were pasted on weibo), the government here has started reporting pollution numbers in major cities around the country. So there's reporting now.

Second, they've forced the state-owned oil companies to retool to start outputting cleaner gasoline, moved big polluting industry out of the cities (steel plants, etc.), closed down barbecue pits, ended the sale of some of the more polluting coal briquettes that used to be common, and are trying to get construction sites to keep the dust down.

All of those steps are helping, but not reversing the trend (so far as I can tell or have heard). There is a push to move from coal-burning power plants to gas-powered power plants, but they need to find the gas (via fracking or other means).

Is there an outcry? There are certainly people posting about the pollution on Weibo, which is China's twitter. There are also plenty of people emigrating to the US, if they can afford it (voting with their feet, even if they can't vote here). But I think for people to do more than that, they'd need to see the government just not giving a damn. So perhaps the attitude is 'wait and see'?

Hope this helps.

By the way, one of my Beijing buddies said of the Shanghai smog: "In Beijing, we call this Tuesday."

I think "Communist" is a bit of a loaded word that in the my American mind is more linked to Stalin and Lenin than Mao and Deng, so I try to stay away from it.

It's probably much more accurate to say the Chinese government is authoritarian state-capitalist. Authoritarian: They don't care what you think, but you better do what they way. State-capitalist: there are large state-owned enterprises supported by preferential loans from the banks.

There is also a thriving private sector. The government's involvement in private sector businesses varies between "just please pay some taxes" for some types and sizes of businesses and heavy-handed regulation and interference in some sectors that makes success in those sectors without government friends nearly impossible.

To put this in perspective, do consider that the US government bailed out the banks and GM, and owns Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. So it's not as though the US is hands off. GM seems to be better run than large Chinese state-owned enterprises, which is saying a lot.

The farms and all businesses were communized back in the 60's, but no longer are, so far as I'm aware. The state does own land, which you lease for decades at a time (this is the same as Hong Kong, which is quite capitalist, btw).

Relaxing the one-child policy is a big deal. Given that countries have fewer children as they industrialize, I expect it won't lead to a population explosion.

I very much wish they would work on reducing the abortion rate by better educating children about having protected sex. I know a Biology teacher here who said her kids know lots about sex from the Internet, so maybe there's some hope that even the attenuated Chinese Internet can help here.

Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are all blocked over here doesn't frustrate the hell out of me.